EDIT: Here’s a link to the opinion. Looking at it very quickly, the narrow issue that the California Supreme Court decided, as a matter of California constitutional law, is this: once the state established a domestic partnership regime for same sex couples that gave pretty much all of the tangible legal rights and imposed pretty much all of the responsibilities as marriage, can the state still reserve the word “marriage” for mixed-sex (if that’s the term) couples only?

This is the logic of Loving coming full circle. The only way for anti-gay-marriage forces to break it, in my view, is to end the association between marriage and the state–in effect, to privatize marriage (relegate it to the churches, where it originated historically)–and to grant civil unions to everybody. I actually think that’s what we should do. It’s how I feel about my own marriage, which was solemnized by a church and recognized by a state. And I’m absolutely certain the right wing nutjobs will never countenance such a thing; instead, they’ll go with state constitutional amendments ordaining marriage as the union of “one man and one woman” so as to make it impossible for “activist judges” to grant “special rights” to gay people. God forbid they should be each other’s legal next of kin. But this is, at most, a delaying tactic. It will work in some states, but not others, and over time these legal barriers will eventually fall. Yes, I know, not quickly enough. (And now do I post this, knowing it will make me absolutely unviable as a candidate for public office in 99% of the country?)